The Ghosts Are Just Guys Under Sheets? 12 Delectable Facts About Arcade Classic ‘Pac-Man’

35 years ago today, Pac-Man first waka waka waka-ed its way into Japanese arcades, and it’s nearly impossible to overstate the game’s influence. Pac-Man was the first game to feature power-ups, and its level design and AI was far more advanced than anything else on the market at the time. Pac-Man was the first title to prove video games could be more than simple, reflex-testing digital toys. Pac-Man had characters, carefully designed stages, and — in its own simple way — actually told a story. Oh, and it was also really fun.

Pac-Man is one of those rare games that simply refuses to age. Three-and-a-half decades later, the little yellow guy is still going strong. Here’s a few tasty facts you may not know about the original Pac-Man…

OF COURSE they’re not ghosts; they’re MONSTERS (and even printed as such on the cabinet gameplay instructions and artwork, and by the creators in old interviews). The intermissions are showing Blinky losing his FUR, revealing a fleshy creature. It was likely from not wanting to bother animating those naked creatures going back to the pen, that they hyst showed eyes going back, and the intermissions showed what was really supposed to be going on.
The whole “ghosts” thing was assumed, based on the old Atari 2600 port, where they looked transparent and were ligher in color. From there, it spread to the trading cards and other merchandise, and now it has become universal, to the point that this is even such an unknown “fact”. (On the Pacmania cabinet, they were still called “monsters”, and the cartoon compromised by calling them “ghostmonsters”).